Adventures of a wife, mom, personal trainer, and certified yoga teacher, with a passion for living a healthy, natural, balanced, and transparent life without borders. All things life, love, food, fitness, marriage, parenthood, and lots of YOGA!<3

Beautiful Breakthrough

Time for the first blog! I’m very excited about this. It’s a little lengthy, but I’ve been contemplating what the long-awaited first blog should be, and in doing so, it only seems fitting to take you back about 6 months to a time that changed me forever. October of 2012. Setting: Destin, Florida, fall, morning.

To preface this day, something in me thought I was pregnant about a week before I left for this trip with my family (all minus my husband) and I was truly expecting it. I had had a few times where I had been late and all those times that, in the end I turned up not pregnant, I dealt with a “mad if I am, mad if I’m not” type of emotion. I wasn’t ready to start trying for a family, but I was always sad when I would start the inevitable monthly cycle. I fought with these feelings so much that played a very confusing tug o’ war with my heart. God reminded me one day in the shower (why does it always seem like the shower is the holy of holy’s sometimes?) that Kalen and I had said we would always be sensitive to the time when He said it was time to start a family. But He also reminded me that I hadn’t done that. I had made my own timeline for how long Kalen and I wanted to wait, and THEN we would ask the Lord his plan. His plan inside my plan, essentially. That’s how it works right? ha Well, needless to say, I kept ignoring those subtle and loving nudges, but they were slowly breaking the ice around some fortifications I had around my heart.

Flash back forward to a beautiful early morning in Destin. I woke early to go for a run by the beach with my sister. This was the day I was on schedule for that lovely monthly gift to arrive, but I was sure it wasn’t going to happen, remember? Well, we all know where this is going. The emotions flaring inside me were more than I could even make sense of. Anger, anger about my anger, sadness, pain, confusion on why I felt pain…and on and on it went. I remember busting opening the bedroom door and saying to my sister, “If you want to go running with me you better get up ’cause I’m leaving.” Yeah, I was a little bitchy nonetheless, but my sister and her grace knew something must be going on and she just said “Ok…be right there”. Poor thing had to catch up with me because I was out of that door like a teenager with an attitude problem. We ran in silence, thank God, and then we decided to split up for a while to go have some quiet time with the Lord on different parts of the beach. As I sat down, the craziest, most beautiful thing happened to me:

All I remember is saying through sobs and blurry eyes, “God, why do I feel this way? I can’t keep doing this!” From there, I never uttered another word for about an hour. Daddy God became so real to me in that moment then He has but one other time in my life that I can still, a year later, be right back there when I think about it. It was an experience that changed me, shaped my belief system, shifted my heart and mindset so drastically, that I can’t go back to the old me if I tried–and I don’t want to. He didn’t come to me as all glorious and powerful, booming voice God. He was so my friend in that moment like I’ve never experienced. He began to tell me how he saw my pain; pain in more areas than one and he named all of them for exactly how they were. He showed me how much I truly longed to have a baby and be a mother and that it was my passion. He began to unravel the places in me that was afraid to let go and really trust that He had the best for me. I am a planner by nature. I see way ahead and already have a strategy for how to get there and what needs to be accomplished now in order to get there effectively. He showed me that he put those qualities in me, loves those qualities. He said, “I love your plans and I’m actually going to use them, but I may not use them in the way you would or when you would sometimes. One thing is for certain, however, if you allow me to be the ultimate planner and let me change plans if necessary, you will experience those very things to all the fullness and joy your heart can stand.” I realized in that moment that I had stopped trusting and needing him. I had let a gifting become the very thing that hindered me from the one who gave it to me in the first place. I realized that I almost had too much vision. I had started to become my god for my future. There are so many details surrounding that hour on the beach and words pale in comparison to the essence of that life changing moment, but I am here to say, I didn’t leave that beach the same way I crossed onto it. So many hindrances fell off like sand from my shoulders and I was a new person. No longer the scared, “God these are my plans, how do yours work inside them?”, make my own future, kind of girl. I was now free from feeling alone. I am still a planner, an “ahead of time” person, a person who sees and makes a game plan. Only now I am able to know when to let go when I hear Him lead in a different direction and really be okay with it, knowing that I am totally taken care of and more. In my “About” page, you see at the bottom Jeremiah 29:11. That is my promise word. He wrote that on my heart that day on the beach and it continues keep me steadfast and bring me back to a place of peace when I’m unsure. It’s become a major part of who I am. That day on the beach was October 29th, 2012.

When I met back up with my sister, we shared small parts of our quiet time with each other. As we did, my sister gave me some advice that day that lined up and confirmed what God had just done to me. When I got home, I shared everything with my husband. Through prayer, we knew we weren’t supposed to actively try for a baby, but that we weren’t supposed to be so strict that it took away from our love either. We knew that whether we got pregnant that day, or 5 years from then, that we were at peace with any plan He had for us. It was about four months until March 2nd, 2013, we found out we were going to have our precious son! His official due date? October 29th, 2013. A wonderful friend and powerful woman of God told me that she just kept hearing that this baby was my going to be my “Beautiful Breakthrough”. It’s not until we received his official due date that the Lord took me back to this encounter. It’s so like him to bring things full circle. Not only did I receive a beautiful breakthrough that day on the beach, but out of what was birthed on that day will be the physical manifestation of it a full year from then. This is so close to my heart and makes me so emotional. He really is my “Beautiful Breakthough!”

[…] new knowledge that we will carry with us forever, along with an ocean-sized capacity to love our beautiful breakthrough that we made out of our love for one another; and our hearts were opened to see deeper into the […]